“We’re not doing 30 bets a year”: Vijay Pande on betting small after running $4 billion at a16z
techcrunch ·
Vijay Pande left a16z, where he managed a nearly $4 billion healthcare and life sciences practice, to co-found VZVC, a much smaller firm with investor Zach Werner. The firm deliberately makes only about five concentrated investments a year, employs no associates, and relies on AI agents for daily operations. In an interview, Pande says AI is shifting biology from a science of discovery toward engineering, but clinical trials are still expensive and often fail because animal models are not very predictive of humans. He also discusses precision medicine, which aims to give patients the right drug the first time, and notes that unlike text, biological data cannot be scraped from the internet, so companies build walled-off datasets. Pande predicts open-source foundation models in biology will have broad impact, similar to what happened with open-source LLMs. He looks for founders with high integrity and long-term thinking, and emphasizes that go-to-market is at least as hard as the technology. He cautions that claims AI will cure everything are overhyped, because limitations in data remain a fundamental constraint.
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